Jeff Healey in Memoriam
Rare 1988 Chat with Canadian Guitar Virtuoso and Jazz Musicologist
20 years ago The Jeff Healey Band scored a deal with Arista Records, making music history. Smokin' blues or vintage jazz: Jeff Healey always did things his own way.
In 1988, Jazz fans were just beginning to hear about about Jeff Healey, the amazing guitar slinger with the low-key, easygoing, soft -spoken style. Suite101 caught up with Healey for an exclusive interview just after Stevie Ray Vaughan shouted that legendary comment, "Man, he is going to revolutionize the way the guitar can be played."
1988 was a banner year for The Jeff Healey Band. Thanks to the sheer moxy of Healey drummer Tom Stephen, a man raised shrewd and weaned from a business-wise background, the band signed to American record label Arista Records (Whitney Houston, Sylvester Stone, Janis Joplin) landing the deal of deals with label mogul Clive Davis. This included a good chunk of artistic control and all Canadian rights to any music released through Healey's deal with RCA / BMG Canada. Because of this historic deal, the Healey piece moved to cover-story status. It was titled Blues Power; subtitle: At the Crossroads with Clive.
The interview was conducted at Healey's, then high-rise bachelor digs in the heart of Toronto – The Big Smoke Bluesville.The Horseshoe, X-Rays, Grossman’s and Albert’s Hall were just a shot away – legendary smoke and booze domains where Healey got his start.
The guitar slinger was in the kitchen preparing Swiss Chalet take-out and Diet Coke, padding about his beautifully antique-furnished flat. For someone blind since age three, Healey possessed uncanny understanding of his space radius at all times.
The writer sat on the floor and the subject ,with cat named Cat, perched on the couch his lunch on a table. The wall was a vinyl museum filled with of jazz platters of masters A to Z: Bix Beiderbecke, Artie Shaw, Fletcher Henderson, and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong all lovingly preserved. Healey asked for a favourite jazz selection and then played some Satchmo on one of two custom made gramophones.
Suite101: Where did you get your 78s from? (in 20 years, Healey's collection went from 9,000 to 30,000)
“When I was a kid my dad told me if I'd put one quarter the effort into my school work as I did into my records, I would have been an A student, which I probably would have, but I didn’t see any reason for it. What’s the point of being an A student? It’s the same as making a lot of money. It doesn’t really achieve anything for you except you get a lot of money.
My grandmother used to listen to her father-in-law's records a lot because she kept them. First of all, she gave a few to my dad to keep in the family when she was getting older and I got interested in those. Then I found out she had a whole whack of them down at her house, so I used to go down there and entertain myself because I was fascinated by them – some of the comedy records of the teens and '20s, some of the vaudevillian type things.
Living here in Canada, we had some of the British humour [that] was imported up here and a lot of the Amercian, both the popular performers and just the plain studio artists; their only records or their only performances were in the studio. That’s what they were good for. There were also quite a few dance records with a couple of records that lean more towards hot music.
We were not subjected up here in the '20s to a lot of jazz. They didn’t see it as a feasible market at all up here. The real true jazz records were distributed mostly either throughout Chicago and areas like that or in the south or some different things would be sold up around New York and Harlem and Detroit and they may have filtered across the border up here, but they weren’t officially released here. So we didn't get very much of that. But it was a start. We had some popular dance records that leaned toward jazz performances.
So I started off with that and the relatives discovered I was so interested that they started going into their attics and coming out with anything from junk to stuff that I still have that I have never seen another copy of and that is just great. Thre was some really good stuff that they just bought to have it at the time and didn’t think anything about it. So that’s how I got started. Then I discovered they were actually selling lots of records through second-hand shops and flea markets and so forth, so I used go down and riffle through them and blow most of my pocket money on them. Gradually, I'm up to a point now, where I end up spending per month about $500 to $600 between auction lists and private collectors and dealers."
Suite101: Do people call you and say "Jeff .. I have this record..."
"Sometimes, if they know I am interested in it. The first call I answered here today was a collector who's probably come up with a couple of things and he wants to know if I have them."
